I was the Set Decorator for this music video which was a fun (and grueling) shoot working together with Production Designer Amy Howard.
The concept was a take on the classic kung fu movie genre + aliens added in for measure. If were to apply a critical film theory lens on this text you could say the representations of race and otherness are problematic and very literal...
...but I'm just going to share fun and funny tidbits from stills instead
ok see that nice stack of billowy smoke in the upper half of the screen? (well if you don't see it I just outlined it in red for you). Well that atmospheric smoke/steam/fog is some handmade fog brought to you by me. (see photo below)
that is me, hidden behind the trash dump in the cold pushing the fog machine in perfectly timed intervals. yes friends, the highlight of my career so far is the hours I spent in the freezing rain at 2am in an alley of Bushwick on a December night/early morning operating a fog machine. All those details are true.
inside trick of how we got that to stay: VELCRO!
remember that enigmatic photo of a bowl of scrambled eggs on a Greenpoint roof I posted a few months back? That was the set-up for this. (the idea was from push-ups training with those raw eggs, they ate all the broken ones as scrambled eggs) As you can see the band was pretty grossed out about these cold 10+ hours old scrambled eggs, but they were good sports about it.
And that friends is a carefully curated and artfully arranged pile of trash on the bottom right-hand corner featuring imported trash from Chinatown in Manhattan to Bushwick, Brooklyn for the purpose of this shot courtesy of Production Designer Amy Howard who I worked with on this video. I don't know anyone else who would be as excited about how this pile of trash came out as me (or Amy).
I would like to confess here that I made an error on those Chinese characters I taped on the window and didn't realize it until it was too late. After learning Chinese for like 15 years (7 of which I lived in Beijing itself!) it is sorta embarrassing that I got that wrong.
That is no reflection on all my great Chinese teachers at Wellesley College or the Foreign Service Institute. I'm going to blame that mistake on the end of a long shoot happening in freezing rain in December.
So for the record the correct characters should be: 出租大房。